However, I’m not down on social media; I guess you could say I’m “down with it.” I’m just making some changes to the way I use it. Here they are:

Flickr

I once said I felt chained to Flickr. Well, I certainly don’t feel that way anymore. Coincidentally, I also haven’t had a photo in Explore in over a year. What I have realized, although I suspected it before, is that Explore is really just a popularity contest. It has nothing to do with the quality of your photos (though it may have something to do with the quality of your photos); it’s really generated by how many times you comment and fave other Flickrites’ photos and therefore how many people comment and fave your photos– and how quickly. If you don’t spend much time on Flickr looking at other people’s photos and commenting and faving them, others are not likely to spend much time reciprocating. I know that the photos I take now are just as good as the ones I used to take–if not better–but all I do anymore is post a photo or set of photos, and when I have time force myself to comment and fave other people’s photos so as to do unto others as I would have others do unto me. If I add photos to a group, I will view some other photos in that group and comment and fave the ones I like. If I admin a group, I will look through the group and thank a few members for sharing certain photos.

I’m not disingenuous— I only comment, fave, and thank if I really like the photos, but I must admit it often feels like an obligation, because I barely have enough time to share photos on Flickr anymore much less look at others. My conscience tells me, though, that if everyone who posted photos to Flickr never looked at anyone else’s, Flickr would be all artists and no appreciators. Yet even that’s not entirely true, because there are plenty of “lurking” Flickr members and plenty of nonmembers who view Flickr photos— they don’t produce; they just consume.

Once in a while, a friend of mine on Facebook will post some photos to Flickr, I will see the link to those photos, and I will go and have a look. Sometimes this is just to be reciprocal, but usually it’s because I’m genuinely interested in the photos. If I’m really not interested, I don’t look. Also, I almost never post photos to Flickr “friends only” or “friends and family only” because all my friends and family are on Facebook now, which leads me to the next social media channel…

Facebook

I’ve said before that, for me, Flickr was for photographers and Facebook was for friends. In the past year, this has become slightly less true. I still love the way Flickr puts geotagged photos on the map and shows the keywords you assign your photos as searchable tags, but I’ve become less interested in EXIF data, since by now I know what ISO, aperture, and shutter speed are required to make certain photos. And Facebook now shows photos in high resolution, which makes the quality of the images just about as good as the viewing quality on Flickr. I also have more photographer friends on Facebook now who have expanded their artistic photo sharing from Flickr to Facebook , especially when they have Facebook Pages.

Facebook Pages

As you may remember, I resisted Facebook Pages for a while until I decided to get a Facebook Page of my own. Several photographers I know also have Facebook Pages, and I “Like” their Pages so I can see the photographs they’re sharing and how they use their Pages to promote their work. Facebook also just upgraded Pages so that Page owners can browse Facebook with their Page accounts and Like or Comment other Page owners’ content, which is another way not only to reciprocate but promote your own work by leaving your mark on others. I just tried this out for the first time last night right after they came out with it, and it seems like a good feature, though I do not plan to abuse it. I think a little social networking and namedropping is okay, but too much of that is just spamming, and I am no spammer.

Not that I would call it spam, but one thing that has led me to Unlike certain people’s and organizations’ Pages is when they add so much content so often that it floods my News Feed. A recording artist I Liked posted updates every few minutes sometimes, saying things like, “I just mopped my kitchen floor in roller skates!” It got obnoxious. I visited the Page to Unlike it and I noticed one of the fans had commented, “Stop clogging my news feed with updates every five minutes!” There are other organizational Pages that seem to make it a point to update at least once a day just to stay relevant even though all they have to say is, “It’s cold here today, but the flowers are still in bloom. Come out and see the Garden!”– along with photos and stories that take up too much space in my News Feed. When that happens, I tend to Unlike that organization’s Page but follow them on Twitter instead, where they can only write 140 characters. Speaking of Twitter…

Twitter

As I’ve said before, I don’t care how many followers I have or how many tweets I post. I might post a few times a week, once a day, or a few times a day during special events. I also don’t follow nearly as many people as I used to. When I first signed up, I invited friends to join Twitter, and some of them joined but only used it a few times and stopped. I stopped following them because there was nothing to follow. I also stopped following people who posted too often, especially when they weren’t really my friends but just people I met once at Tweetups. As of this writing, I only follow 15 people and 11 organizations– though I might follow a couple more organizations I just Unliked on Facebook.

Foursquare

Bah. I don’t need to tell the world where I am just to earn badges or become a “Mayor.” I don’t use Foursquare anymore; I use Facebook Places now, and only to update my friends when I’m at special places for special occasions. Besides, Facebook just introduced Deals, so if I really want to play the customer loyalty game I’ll try it. I don’t know, though– I like to check in to tell friends of my adventures, not to advertise for businesses.

YouTube

Not much change there, really, except that I changed my channel from azsingersigner to danieljamesgreene.

Have you changed the ways you use social media? I would love to hear how.

Has this happened to you on Flickr lately? You’ve tagged photos at various times with lowercase and title case keywords, and you decide you want to make them lowercase for standardization. You go to your All Tags page and click Edit to the right of one of the lowercase / capitalized tags in the list; for example, I wanted to standardize “accessibility, Accessibility” to “accessibility.” After clicking Edit, I get an “Edit this tag” page that shows Accessibility in the text entry field, and below that, a line that offers “Or, use a different format: accessibility” with “accessibility” as a hyperlink. I click accessibility, and Flickr puts the lowercase version of the keyword (tag) in the text entry field. I click Save and a dialog box pops up that says, “Are you sure you want to replace accessibility with accessibility?” (I know that looks odd, but the first instance of “accessibility” in that sentence is the database version of the tag, which will always be lowercase, and the second instance is the display version of the tag.) I click OK, but does Flickr change the tag? No. And there are only four (4) photos are tagged with that keyword! This has been going on for me for the past three weeks. In fact; the first night, I wasted two hours changing tags from title case to lowercase only to find out in the morning that Flickr hadn’t changed any of them.

If you think I’m crazy for caring about tag standardization and spending two hours working on it, then this blog post is not written for you. I know this is not something most people care about—and, God, do I know there are worse problems in the world!—but I’m sure there are a lot of others out there like me who do care about this and are bugged by it. This screenshot got 5,704 views in its first 24 hours on Flickr, so obviously I’m not the only one who’s having the problem and searching the Web to find out who else is.

I posted about this problem in a thread in the Flickr Help Forum three weeks ago and have not gotten resolution. Two weeks ago, Flickr staff changed the title of the thread to “[resolved] Batch tag update not working“– even though the problem is not resolved. If you are still having this problem, I encourage you to go to that Help Forum thread (link above) and let them know this problem is still unresolved and you would like them to fix it.

If you have an image editing / photo organizing application, you may input these scene codes in the IPTC Scene field under the Image section of the IPTC Core metadata. These codes (or keywords, if you will) help describe what a photo is “of.” You may also wish to add them as keywords or “tags” since sites like Flickr make it possible for people to search for photos by “tag.”

I’m sharing these IPTC NewsCodes™ under the IPTC licensing agreement. I hope these metadata help your photos and mine to be found and purchased in a prosperous new year!

IPTC Scene Codes

Copyright 2010, IPTC, www.iptc.org, All Rights Reserved.

headshot

A head only view of a person (or animal/s) or persons as in a montage

half-length

A torso and head view of a person or persons

full-length

A view from head to toe of a person or persons

profile

A view of a person from the side

rear view

A view of a person or persons from the rear

single

A view of only one person, object or animal

couple

A view of two people who are in a personal relationship, for example engaged, married or in a romantic partnership

two

A view of two people

group

A view of more than two people

general view

An overall view of the subject and its surrounds

panoramic view

A panoramic or wide angle view of a subject and its surrounds

aerial view

A view taken from above

under-water

A photo taken under water

night scene

A photo taken during darkness

satellite

A photo taken from a satellite in orbit

exterior view

A photo that shows the exterior of a building or other object

interior view

A scene or view of the interior of a building or other object

close-up

A view of, or part of a person/object taken at close range in order to emphasize detail or accentuate mood. Macro photography.

action

Subject in motion such as children jumping, horse running

performing

Subject or subjects on a stage performing to an audience

posing

Subject or subjects posing such as a “victory” pose or other stance that symbolizes leadership

symbolic

A posed picture symbolizing an event – two rings for marriage

off-beat

An attractive, perhaps fun picture of everyday events – dog with sunglasses, people cooling off in the fountain

movie scene

Photos taken during the shooting of a movie or TV production

I continue to take photographs and share them on Flickr. Some of my recent adventures include hiking Camelback Mountain for the first time, a weekend getaway to Jerome, going to the Arizona State Fair for the first time in the five years that I’ve lived here, going “full frame” by trading in my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and EF-S lenses for a used Canon 5D, and meeting a longtime Flickr friend from Brooklyn who visited me and my husband with his husband. It was great to bring the online life and real life together, and we all really hit it off. There are several other photo sets I’ve posted in months since my last blog post as well. The best way to keep up with what I’m up to in a visual way is to follow my Flickr photostream.

I’ve also really gotten into Facebook this year. I don’t add people I don’t know as Friends, and I don’t have a Fan Page, but I do enjoy keeping up with my friends through status updates, photos, videos, links, etc. I am sort of the designated photographer at gatherings of friends and coworkers, so it’s always fun to upload an album from a shared event and tag everyone in it who’s on Facebook– which is most of them. For a while there, I was spending a couple/three hours a day on Facebook, but I’ve cut back because I have so many other priorities. I felt I was neglecting my photography and Flickr social circle for a while there, so I’ve returned to spending a bit more time on that. One thing I love that Flickr added in the last couple of months is People in Photos, which allows you to tag your Flickr friends in photos the way you can tag your friends in photos on Facebook. Those friends have to be Flickr members in order to be tagged, so it’s most useful for photos from FlickrMeets; that is, when a group of photo geeks get together to go on a shooting spree. Not necessarily good for your neighbor’s family’s Thanksgiving party unless they’re all Flickrites themselves. Thanks to this new feature and my general hamminess, I can now point you to photos of me on Flickr. As of this writing, there are over 900, though I’m not sure they are all public!

Like many people, I also got my Twitter account this year. At first, I was frustrated with it and with the way some people twittered “too much.” After a while, I just learned to accept it for what it is. I must admit I only occasionally log in to check up on the people I follow, and I don’t follow a lot of people to begin with. I don’t really care how many followers I have or how many updates I’ve posted. I’m in no hurry to send my thousandth tweet or garner my thousandth follower, though I wouldn’t put it past myself to announce the milestones when they hit.

In addition to sharing my life publicly on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, I created my profile on LinkedIn this year to network with other professionals and share my professional achievements. My greatest professional achievements this year have been coordinating the Purple Communications booth and interpreting pool at the 2009 Arizona RID State Conference, being promoted to Video Interpreter / Trainer at Purple Communications’ Arizona Communication Center, and representing Purple as an interpreter at the National Black Deaf Advocates conference. Outside of my work with Purple, 2009 was the first year I developed and taught ASL interpreting workshops. I know I’ve already shared some of this in this blog, and I’ve even castigated myself for perhaps going overboard in tooting my own horn, but at the end of the year, I must say that I have a feeling of pride. I have been through some dark times in my life, and when you’ve been through that and come out on the other side of it, you cherish every win.

Tonight is the beginning of Chanukah, the eight-day Festival of Lights. I look forward to lighting candles, exchanging gifts, frying donuts and potato pancakes, and going to a party or two. I do think that, in some ways, the holiday season is the most wonderful time of the year. I love both Chanukah and Christmas for the festivities, the colors, the lights, the social events, the cold, dark nights, and yes, the gifts.

What do I look forward to doing next year? I hope that next year brings many more opportunities for me to train video interpreters at Purple Communications and in my own interpreting workshops. 2010 is a year for RID regional conferences, and I plan to submit presenter proposals in the hope of teaching my workshops at at least a couple of them. There is also the Conference of Interpreter Trainers in 2010, which I hope to attend and possibly present at. The National Alliance of Black Interpreters is hosting their conference right here in Phoenix in 2010, and I do hope to be a part of that as well.

What I wish to do in my personal life in 2010 is to show my family how much I love them, to show respect and support to my friends, clients, and colleagues, to take on new challenges and new adventures, to be happy relaxing and being, and to dive deeper into this rich experience we call living.

Lately, I notice — especially with Facebook — that I get pain in my elbow and wrist from so much mouse clicking to follow everyone’s posts. I read all my Friends’ postings, regardless of how well I know them, and I just keep reading and commenting and reading and refreshing pages. There are people in my Friends list that I’ve spent more time with on Facebook than in real life. But no matter what our relationship in real life, I find myself reading everything they post. It begins to seem as though my “best friends” are the ones who interact with me the most on Facebook. Yet that’s insidious, because it doesn’t mean they’re closer to me; it just means they’re on Facebook a lot and they like to interact with people on it. It’s seductive to sit there clicking, clicking, clicking on everyone’s content, yet I have to do something about my overuse strain. I am, after all, a sign language interpreter, and I have to save my hands and arms for work.

And speaking of seductive, it is so tempting to add all the people Facebook suggests to me as Friends– well, all the people I know, anyway. I never went and added all my friends Friends or anything crazy like that, but I did add almost all the classmates, coworkers, and friends I recognized. It got to the point where I had 378 Friends! As I started following more closely, I realized that I hadn’t even remembered some of my classmates correctly. In one case, I thought I was following a guy who was one class ahead of me until I realized that I was following his brother who was two classes behind me. He seems like a great guy, but the last straw was when he made that “tell me something you remember about me” prompt in his status message, and I realized, well, I didn’t remember anything.

Even more seductive is the ability to develop a fan base that will respond to what I post. But again, those who respond are not necessarily my friends. They are people who appreciate what I produce. They are fine people. Nothing wrong with them at all. But I have to be realistic with myself and ask myself why I need their validation, and why I’m spending time doing this when I could be doing other things that are more creative and productive. Or just spending time doing nothing at all, soaking up life and resting my wrists.

I’ve gotten overwhelmed with Flickr. I have 275 contacts right now, and I think I had even more at one point. There’s no way I can do them all justice. I tend to look at a few photos that show up on my home page, and sometimes surf from there onto other photos. I leave some comments and favorites. But I used to go crazy with it. Just as I do with Facebook now, I would view and comment on almost everything and then refresh the pages to see if there was anything else. I’m thinking about weeding my contacts list– not that I spend that much time on Flickr anymore. It’s been mostly about Facebook this past year.

And I just deleted about 250 Friends on Facebook. Many of them didn’t use their accounts much, but some of them used their accounts so much that I felt I had to remove my connection to them because I was overwhelmed by all their updates. Some of them, as I said before, weren’t even the people I thought I was following. Every single one of them was someone I spent more time with online than I ever did in real life. Yet, you know what’s sad? I now look at my Facebook home page and click Refresh because it looks so dull. But that’s real life! My real life doesn’t have that many people in it, so why should my online life be so peopled? I had Friends on Facebook from theatre, photography, interpreting, Flickr, the gay community, the deaf community, the deaf gay community, San Diego, Phoenix, Junior Theatre, the School of Creative & Performing Arts– and those are not the only communities I’ve ever made friends in! If I added all the friends I’ve ever known, my Friends list would be in the thousands.

But you know what saddened me even more? The fact that some of my friends from the past didn’t want to be my friends in the present. Sure, they added me as Friends, but they didn’t do anything with their accounts, didn’t call my cell phone when they said they would… or they didn’t add me as Friends at all. Just when you think it’s safe to go back in the past.

A lot of this struggle is about the distinction between past and present, reality and fantasy. The fantasy is that friends are forever. The reality is that friends are the people you spend time with, either in the present or the recent past, with plans to see each other again in the near future. When people aren’t doing things together, there’s less reason to remain friends. Due to the joy and pain I’ve experienced in life, I tend to want to heal my past and sooth my present with it, or reach back to my past and validate it with my present. I see the past, present, and future as a circle, and I want to mend that circle, let it be unbroken, integrate it. I want to be integrated, to have integrity.

The struggle is far from over. May we all find peace.

I am thrilled to be a part of this. My Flickr friend, Jon Gilbert Leavitt (jglsongs on Flickr), asked if he could use my photo Rainbow Flag Above Me in this video to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first gay pride parade that occurred after the Stonewall Rebellion. A longtime gay activist of sorts, I wrote a paper on the Stonewall Rebellion for a history class in my senior year of high school in 1985. Now, 24 years later, I’m contributing again to the commemoration of this important historic event. Enjoy the video and the song written by Jon and sung by his partner and another artist. Watch for my photo in the montage near the end.

My friend Robert, who took this photo of his daughter after a self-portrait of mine, writes:

I’ve wanted to take this pic for a long time. I saw Daniel’s pic and thought to myself “I have one of those whistles somewhere around the house.”

My daughter didn’t need any coaxing to pose for this as she’s always had a very high opinion of Dan. She’s in good company.

Wow! I’m flattered. When someone takes what you’ve created and creates something else in response, that’s interactive, co-creative art! That’s community. I love it!

P.S. I’ve met Robert and his daughter Stephanie on a few Flickrmeets and photo strolls.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

This is a photo of a neighbor’s lingering holiday lights taken with the Lensbaby Composer with a heart-shaped wide aperture. The manual focus ring was adjusted to place the lights out of focus and create spectral highlights that appear as heart shapes due to the shape of the aperture.

NOTE: Thanks to you, this photo hit Flickr’s Explore pages! You are welcome to blog it, download it, print it, share it, etc. All I ask is that you not use it for non-commercial purposes only & give me photographer credit, e.g. “Photo by Daniel Greene.”

I need to take a break from Flickr and piece together some new creative projects.

Instead of writing books, scholarly articles, creating and presenting workshops, putting on singing concerts, or any number of other things I might do, I’ve spent the past two years and two months on Flickr. Lately, as you can see, I’ve been weaning myself from the constant level I kept up for two years. I’ve been shooting fewer photos and only posting three photos a day– or fewer. I’ve been working on jigsaw puzzles — like this one — rather than spending so much time on photos and Flickr. Even if I do nothing but puzzles, reading books (which I’ve been doing a lot more of), and watching TV, it would be better than spending so much time on photography and Flickr. Sure, I could spend more time on photography and try to make it pay, but that’s another career I don’t feel like making a go of right now. I’d rather make more of my ASL interpreting career.

I’ve been interpreting and going to interpreting workshops for the past 18+ years. Babies have been born and raised to adulthood while I’ve been taking workshops from other interpreters. It’s time that I started teaching workshops rather than just attending them. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself, but that’s how I feel about it. I have a lot of experience, knowledge, and insight, and I want to make something of it. I now have a workshop outlined and scheduled for November 22 from 9am-3pm.

I’m also a performing artist. I’m contracted to sing in the chorus of the opera Aida at the Orpheum Theatre with the Phoenix Opera on Friday, January 30, at 7:30 and Sunday, February 1 at 2:00. I’ve never been in a grand opera before, and I’m nervous. I need to focus my energies on this project, and rehearsals begin in December.
In addition to that, Andy & I are going on a two-week European vacation in October. I want to spend more time with Andy getting familiar with the places we’ll be visiting.

Since I joined Flickr in July 2006, I’ve created and administered three groups, and I’ve organized half a dozen FlickrMeets. It’s time to pass the baton. I’ve recruited, promoted, and trained co-admins in my groups. It is now up to them to either take over running the groups or recruit other co-admins or moderators to help them. And I trust that if members want meetups, then members will organize them.

I don’t mean to come off like, "Bye all y’all bitches! You can kiss my ass!" Believe me, whatever anger I feel is toward myself for once again diving too deeply into something, taking on too much responsibility, and burning out. I have enjoyed all the cameraderie, teaching, learning, sharing, laughs, tears (now and then), and the adventure of this experiment with this new medium (or should I say forum) we call Flickr. It’s just that I can’t imagine myself doing what I’ve been doing for another two years and two months.

I’ll still put up a photo now and again, and I still look forward to The Farm at South Mountain FlickrMeet on Saturday, October 18th, at 7:30 AM. I’ll just have to keep Flickr to a minimum while I turn other dreams into realities.

Just as a boat is chained to the sea, sometimes I feel chained to Flickr.

I am now going through the 420 photos I took during the six days of my trip. Four hundred and twenty photos that all came out well. Yes, there are some things that I took multiple shots of in order to get the best one, but still… how do you work your way through all that and post it on Flickr without boring people? I’ve been limiting myself to posting only three or four photos a day so that people will look at them, which seems to be working, except I have to ask myself why I share all these photos with the world. I took this working vacation on my own, and one of the reasons I took these photos was to share them with my husband, Andy, who couldn’t come on the trip with me. That makes sense to me– to want to share with my husband everything I wish I could have shared with him while we were apart. And I suppose it makes sense to want to share photos with family and close friends. But I’m starting to wonder why I care whether people I’ve never met will stop and look at my photos. I hardly make any money giving my photos away. I could write travel articles and get paid for the work I put into taking, geotagging, editing, organizing, naming, describing my photos… but I don’t. Instead, I spend several hours each day on the computer and on Flickr. I post photos and look at other people’s photos. I enjoy this, but often it seems like work.

I sometimes look at what I do as a creative outlet and a chance to share information with others just for the sake of sharing. I guess there’s a part of me that appreciates all the hard work other amateur photographers and bloggers put into what they publish, and I want to give back. I’ve always had a work ethic that demanded that I contribute to my community, be it local or global. So I guess this is my contribution.

But I have a B.A. in English, and I often think I should be writing for a living instead of writing for nothing. And with my 18 years of experience as an American Sign Language interpreter, I think I should be developing and presenting workshops on interpreting, or even writing books about it. But I’m not. So why do I keep giving away hours of my day, day after day, to Flickr? I don’t know. I guess, in a weird way, I’m lonely. I have a husband and two dogs, a few close friends and family who love me, yet I still crave an audience. I want to communicate with people, have them listen to me, receive their response and feedback. But couldn’t I do that as a writer? Sometimes I fear that in the process of communicating with images I am losing the ability to communicate with words. Perhaps it is my purpose in life to paint images with words, not just by capturing them in photographs. It is harder to say what you want with words than it is with images… or is it? I guess if the image above said it all then I wouldn’t be writing this now; would I?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions yet. But I need to keep thinking about what else I should be doing with my life and how being chained to Flickr may be stopping me from fulfilling my potential as a human being. I don’t need to prove that I can take a good photo. I know I can. But then again, one doesn’t do something again and again just to prove he can do it, does one? I mean, if I write a best-selling book, I will have proven that I can write a good book, but I’d still probably want to write another book, and another, and another.

I do know that I get a lot out of photography. The act of shooting photos is meditative; it allows me (or forces me) to really look at things, to see them from various angles, to see them as they are and to capture them as I imagine them. And when I take photos of people or other animals, looking at the photographs afterward helps me to see them, to really gaze at them and take them in in a way that might not feel comfortable for either me or my subject in the moment. I also get to explore my moods and the moods of others, including the earth’s (if you can consider a cloudy day or the flowers of spring as an expression of the earth’s “moods”). My moods often mirror those of the earth, and through capturing images at those times I can share my own feelings with other people.

I do have a need to be seen and heard. Always have. Call it what you will, but I accept it as a fact about myself. I have almost never worked behind the scenes. Even the work I have done behind the scenes (writing, photography) ends up in the public eye. So just about everything I’ve ever done for money or for nothing has been for an audience. Heck, look at what I make my living at nowadays– interpreting phone calls, being heard by hearing people and watched by deaf people.

I hate to think that I need to keep writing, acting, singing, photographing, etc. to feel loved and lovable. I would like to believe that I am loved and lovable regardless of how much I produce or create. I sometimes wonder if it is the occasional photo that gets a lot of response and/or ends up in Flickr’s Explore pages that keeps me going, makes me feel like a star for a day, gives me the feeling of being not alone, but a member of a global family. I don’t know. Whatever my reasons are, I aim to practice moderation and feel completely unchained and free to choose just how much Flickring I do.